Dangerously low on fuel, Voyager seeks to resupply at a totalitarian planet. While those efforts succeed, B'Elanna and Tuvok are captured, and Janeway escapes only with the help of a local named Caylem. Caylem's wife has been imprisoned by the regime, and his mind has slipped to a point where he thinks Janeway is his daughter. The captain doesn't want to put Caylem in danger, but she may need his help to rescue her crew from prison.
This idea for this episode was pitched by two authors, Michael Jan Friedman and Kevin J. Ryan, who for years had been writing for Star Trek's tie-in book line. That pitch was for somebody to become a Sancho Panza (or Dulcinea) to a Don Quixote-like alien. Unfortunately, what resulted puts a lot of emphasis on Quixote and doesn't offer much of a story to his "sidekick."
It's no wonder Joel Grey was finally wooed to Star Trek by this script: Caylem is a huge, meaty role with range, pathos, and a great death scene. But he interacts with only one main character, and that character barely gets a journey at all. Janeway's arc, I suppose, is that she comes to show kindness to someone she had dismissed. But empathy and mercy have never been in short supply for her. That might have been a meaningful character journey for Picard or Kirk, but for Janeway it's pretty much starting and ending in the same place.
Along the way, you have to overlook a lot of tiny details that don't add up. An awful lot of people seem not notice Janeway's lack of the alien nose makeup here. Sensors and other technology conveniently/inconveniently do/don't work as needed to fill exactly 42 minutes. Why is Janeway leading the Away Team mission in the first place and not Chakotay?
How exactly does Caylem rescue Janeway from armed soldiers at the start of the episode? They have to cut to the opening credits there because nothing would have made sense. The alien leader says that keeping some crazy old man alive sends a message about opposing his regime? It seems to me that anyone who even knows who Caylem is at all is only going to read the "message" as needless cruelty. (But I suppose real-world authoritarians aren't any more self-aware than the fictional ones.)
There are a couple of elements that do work -- to an extent that I really wish we'd gotten more of them. B'Elanna and Tuvok seem to be a great character pairing: she is ruled by her roiling emotion, and he is stalwartly in control of his. Her reaction to his barriers breaking down is surprisingly powerful. Elsewhere, character rehab of Neelix seems to be continuing in earnest; he basically saves the day here, resolving the problem already in progress at the start of the episode.
Other observations:
- Joel Grey is not the first Oscar winner to appear on Star Trek, of course. Deep Space Nine had already landed Louise Fletcher in a recurring role.
- Any fan of 24 will recognize "Aaron Pierce" actor Glenn Moshower, who shows up in a bit part as an alien guard. That guy was made to play guards, apparently.
- The trailer promoting this episode back in the 1990s was needlessly salacious. Ignoring pretty much the entire episode, it focused on the 15-or-so seconds in which Janeway poses as a prostitute to distract the guards, implying that the captain faces a dilemma of giving her body to save her ship. Gross.
Joel Grey is solid in this episode, but ultimately I'm just not that invested in Caylem compared to the problems of the Voyager crew. And given that balance of interest, the balance of action in the episode is way off. I find "Resistance" to be a fairly dry C.
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